GAME NOTES: Off to their best start in more than two decades, the Green Bay Phoenix now focus their efforts on taking down the Georgia State Panthers on Thursday night.

Outside of an 84-60 loss to Wisconsin on the road, the Phoenix have been spreading their wings in the early going of 2014-15. The team is currently riding a four-game win streak, thanks to a 78-52 thumping of Minnesota-Duluth on Monday night at home.

As for the Panthers, they too are experiencing more positive outcomes than negative through the first few weeks of the campaign. Since dropping back-to- back meetings against Iowa State and Colorado State on the road, GSU picked up three wins in as many days in Michigan as part of the CBE Hall of Fame Classic and followed those up with a 66-63 victory at IUPUI on Saturday afternoon.

With respect to the all-time series between these two schools on the hardwood, the Phoenix won the only previous meeting back in 1981 by a score of 78-66 as part of the Green Bay Classic.

Aside from shooting just 12-of-22 at the free-throw line, something that could be an issue later in the season against tougher competition, the Phoenix had no problems dismissing Minnesota-Duluth to kick off the month of December. Keifer Sykes stepped up with 18 points on 7-of-11 shooting from the floor, followed by Jordan Fouse with 10 points, seven boards and four assists, while Greg Mays responded with 13 points and a couple of blocked shots for the hosts who turned the ball over just seven times and shot 51.7 percent from the field.

Sykes, who now has 100 games under his belt, leads Green Bay with 18.5 ppg as a 54.2 percent shooter from the floor. Perhaps just as important are his efforts on the glass (4.3 rpg) and in the passing category (26 assists) over six games. Mays pitches in with 12.2 ppg, but he has a couple of issues with it comes to shooting the long ball (0-of-7) and getting teammates involved (two assists) in his 150 minutes of action.

Defensively, the Phoenix are clamping down on the competition to the point where those foes are scoring only 58.2 ppg on 37.7 percent shooting from the floor and 27.4 percent on the perimeter.

A pair of free throws by R.J. Hunter with 10 seconds remaining in regulation gave the Panthers some breathing room against IUPUI over the weekend and brought the squad a victory on the road. Hunter made good on all but one of his 11 shots at the charity stripe as he finished with a game-high 27 points, although he did make just 1-of-7 attempts behind the 3-point line. Ryan Harrow produced another 21 points for the squad, while the other three starters combined for a mere nine points as they took a collective six shots from the floor.

Hunter, the leading scorer for the Panthers in each of the last three games and four of the first seven outings of the season, is posting 22.9 ppg as he connected on 46.5 percent of his field goal tries and has accounted for 22 of the unit's 47 3-point conversions thus far. Harrow pitches in with 20.3 ppg and between the two of them have combined for 65 of the team's 108 assists as well, presumably many of those going to each other since the next highest scorer in transfer Kevin Ware with his 7.9 ppg.

Both of these teams have some stats/records that have been inflated due to questionable competition, but there's no denying that Hunter and Harrow provide one of the best scoring tandems in basketball right now and being at home should only bolster their efforts.